lauren/cloudessence, 28, tme black nonbinary bisexy (they/them ONLY) hii💕 welcome to @socalgal 's "art"/refuge from deletion blog😚 nsfw tag is #686 art tags are: #my wips #ljart transmisogynists/zionists/pedo apologists do NOT fucking follow or interact
hi. im currently living in an abusive environment and its. bad. i had surgery awhile back and still have a huge wound that nearly spans into my intestines because it's taking a long time to heal and they didn't want to close me up. i had no choice but to move back here. my mom promised that she would help me with stuff while i recover but she yells at me every time i ask for help with anything and im not capable of doing any of it by myself without further injuring myself
i need help. i cant afford housing rn bc donos have been difficult and idk if i can get a caregiver but if i could at least get help with basic expenses like food and getting my phone activated and saving up for if (when lbr) i need a quick escape i would really appreciate it
love you all. sorry i keep getting into these situations - just really hard to stay stable and housed when you're severely disabled without irl support
ppal | vmo (using my friends rn, locked out of mine possibly permanently) | cshapp | kof1
I write to you with tears welling in my eyes, my body wracked with pain every second. I write to you because the ignore me and neglect I've endured hurts me more than my injuries. So remember, even if I die, I will never f0rgive anyone who ignored me and my suffering. I implore everyone to look at me and h@lp me by d0nating and sharing whatever they can.
This week, I've been battling severe pain and frequent fainting spells due to severe anemia, and I'm completely unable to afford essential medications because of their high cost. All I wish for is for these fainting spells to stop, and for me to find compassionate hearts to stand by me so I can bu.y my medication and recover quickly.
Shrapnel still lodges in my body, and the pain keeps me awake at night. What makes my suffering even worse is that I was injured when our house was bombed while we were inside. I need urgent surgery but the cost of the operation is exorbitant, and I can't afford it. Now, I can't even afford painkillers to the constant pain tearing at my body.
Please I don't want to diie, I just want to live without pain. I need your sincere sup.port to save my life and end this suffering as soon as possible. Please, I would be extremely grateful to anyone who can d0nate to me. and if you can't, I hope you will shar.e this pOst.
I am very worried about Fadel. He is suffering unendurable pain and desperately needs relief as soon as possible. Please donate to him if you have anything to spare.
It is easy to forget just how central military violence has been and remains to business as usual. More than 5 per cent of annual CO2 emissions stem from the militaries around the world. We often talk about flying and how bad it is for the climate, and it is bad, but civil aviation accounts for about 3 per cent of the total. And the 5 per cent that comes from militaries precede actual war: these are peacetime emissions, made in the process of maintaining the logistical apparatuses and fighting capacities of armies before they go to war. When they do go into battle, the fuel is set on fire and the bombs rain down in bursts of concentrated additional emissions. The US, of course, is at the centre of all this. The emissions from the occupation army during the war on Gaza might be counted as just another category of American emissions. The US outweighs every other country; indeed, as Neta C. Crawford notes, 'the US military is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world and thus the world's single largest greenhouse gas emitter In her book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, she brilliantly charts the development of what she calls 'the deep cycle' The militaries of first the UK and then the US found coal, followed by oil, to be indispensable for waging war: for manufacturing weapons, transporting soldiers into the battlefield, providing mobility once engaged, bringing firepower to bear on the enemy. By basing its operations on fossil fuels, the US military contributed to their spread throughout the economy; and when both the military and economy were thoroughly dependent on them, the protection of this essential commodity itself became an imperative of war. No part of the world has been so deeply formed and scarred by this cycle as the Middle East. Although Palestine is at its centre, the devastation clearly extends to other countries too: think only of Iraq and Yemen.
— The Destruction of Palestine is The Destruction of the Earth, Andreas Malm
The streets of Arminium were empty tonight. It was an eerie empty, an inhabited empty; an empty as if suddenly, every single person walking those streets had decided they had somewhere else to be. As if the whole city had simply left. You could feel presences that had been there, like they were in your peripheral vision, gone when your gaze sought them directly. It was the kind of empty that could only exist in a place typically inhabited, and Arminium was a place very inhabited.
Tonight though, she was a ghost town. Darkness settled on her streets, shadows laying like blankets, thick and heavy, enveloping the restaurants, trade stalls, venues, theaters, bathhouses, forums, narcotics bars, and communal housing that lined her broad, colonnaded avenues. The city’s mass transit littered the streets, big articulated groundcars and the ubiquitous trains, trams, and maglevs that dotted any Imperial city.
The great, multi-colored hab-towers loomed high overhead, fading off into the night sky. Mazes of walkways, transit routes, and aircar lanes spanned the chasms between the towers. Those mighty buildings leered down, the only light in the city barely peering out from the forests of comms masts, sat uplinks, environmental units, radomes and sensor towers, red warning lights blinking steadily into the gloom. The lights did little to pierce the city’s oppressive darkness, strangled by the shadows and the damp, foggy blackness.
It was through that blackness that a lone gunship descended, twin engines carving deep furrows in the wispy skin of Arminium’s constant cloud cover. Her deep red hull blazed in the gloom, lurid and violating, the color of flesh round a foreign body or bad wound. It was not of Arminium. She traced her own descent, blinking running lights like the lure of a deep-sea predator seeking blindly in the brine. The roar of her engines reverberated between the hab-towers and the city’s streets, echoing down its canyons, booming through its empty alleys and deserted buildings. The city spoke it back like the whisper of a crowd, thousands of echoes that could be heard loud, from all around, as if you stood in their midst, all eyes fixed on you. There was nothing else to compete with it, nothing but the half-imagined background hum of any industrial city, even one bereft of life like this.
The gunship dipped lower, angling towards the ground with its peregrine prow. It banked and darted between the towers, winding the thousands of meters down to surface level. It had been dim even at the communal levels, but down here near the city floor, it was a different world. The darkness swallowed everything, and the twin engines were nothing as it encroached. Their blaze disappeared as the gunship hauled back on its thrust, engine nacelles tilting downward to redirect the lift.
It hung like a carrion bird over the dead city, the roar of the engines muffled by the close, confined walls of the hab-tower foundations, great anchors of stone and alloy grafted into the planet’s firmament. Searchlights stabbed out from her hull, fingers of light questing out into the inky blackness, playing across one of the principal heavy-lift flight pads at the city’s center, near to its civil support systems.
Sergeant Alicia Harkin watched those lights crawl across tarmac, fencing, and a lonely flight control tower sat at the center of four great platforms laid out like a compass. With a final groan, the gunship’s engines cut out, and she settled onto the north pad, sinking down onto her landing shocks. She could see the world outside through the gunship’s cameras, dotted across her hull. Alicia saw through them, studied the urban landscape stretching out inexorably into the black or vanishing back up into the shrouded heights. She tried not to see movement every time the lights crept across an overturned car or apartment balcony. It couldn’t be movement.
That’s what the sensors also bolted onto the ship were for, and they were clear. Her training sergeant had always said you should trust your senses, but believe in the equipment. The senses were tied to your mind, and that could fail you at any time. Her mind couldn’t help but picture things out there, slinking in the dark. The city couldn’t be truly empty. It felt wrong, like an inversion, a mistake. A violation.
The gunship ticked and whirred as it cooled, superheated hull bleeding re-entry heat into the surrounding air. The heat leeched out of it, drawn out by the cold, hollow urbanity around it, sucked up by atmosphere and buildings so normally accustomed to the swelter-heat of mass population and human activity. The alloy hull settled in the cold, the chill creeping up her struts, worming through her plating deep into the craft. It seeped up through the gaps and the seams, slithering into her innards as the heat slowly drained away, pumped out by the last few gasps of her impulse jets cycling down. The cold settled like a pall over the craft, lying in state.
In her hold, cocooned inside meters of interweaved plating, armor mesh, and the varied layers of skin that made up her frame, Harkin and her fellow passengers sat in silence. No one wanted to be the first voice to speak in the city.
Her charge, however, seemed to have no compunction here. Her charge. Harkin scoffed, examining the Bureau of Intelligence officer again. She’d met them on the ride down, hadn’t even known they were coming. Worse, the personnel file she’d found was little more than black bars on blank pages. Redactions or not, non-combatants never sat well with her. Especially spooks. Spooks were bad omens. The civilian, dressed in black field fatigues and an army trooper’s helmet, rose from their crash chair, turning to dig some personal items from the overhead storage webbing. A pistol, slotted into a chest rig like reflex; a helmet-mounted video recorder, which they spent a moment bolting on. Last, one of the Bureau’s active camo shawls, cinched to the attachment points on their uniform’s shoulders, back, and chest. All of it done without looking, all of it routine.
“Right, let’s get moving, people. Last registered city plan shows about an hour transit time to the CivCent building. Should take us another half an hour to get civil defense sensors up and broadcasting.” The civvie turned, looking at Harkin and her team like they’d only just realized other people were on the gunship. “What? We’ve got a city of three million people and not one of them seems to be here. It’s taken us long enough to respond, I don’t want to waste any more time just sitting here. Up and at em, troopers.”
That animated her people. The rest of the team rose, restraint harnesses tossed aside as they went through the motions of equipment check. Legion training was pretty insistent on maximizing the luxury of a non-combat insertion. No incoming fire meant you damn well better give every piece of gear a final once over.
Nine clicks on the squad comms channel told her the squad was green across the board. She turned to the civilian while her corporal ran his hands across her armor, checking seals and securing plates one last time. Being the ranking officer came with its perks, and she patched her charge’s voice link to her private channel.
“Two rules, sir, before we disembark. One, I don’t want to have to tell the Bureau I lost an agent, so if any one of my people gives you an order, you follow it. Two, don’t show me up like that again. Fog of war is gonna play hell on the team’s nerves already, they don’t need commanders sniping at each other. Outside this channel, you and me are best friends while we’re in Arminium. Beyond that, sir, we’ll follow your lead. This is your field, not mine. Excited to work with you,” Alicia finished. She put a little more warmth on that last part than she really needed to.
They were all on the same side, after all. Navigating this city was going to be unpleasant enough already. No need to add internal division to the list of things she needed to watch out for. The half smile her charge flashed at her let her know the feelings were shared.
Good, she thought to herself. We’re all professionals here. She swept her eyes across the team, lingering long enough that each of her troopers knew she’d seen them.
“Alright Hades 1-1, let’s get it done. Aduwalé, Techapsi, you’re on point.” She looked at the agent, gave them a nod. “You’re mission lead, sir. Lead the way.” One of her troopers hit the hatch release, and the troop bay doors sighed open. The dead city’s still air entered the hold.
As one, ten Legionaries and a single civilian walked through the yawning maw of the big gunship’s hold. Arminium’s frigid night swallowed them whole.
—————————
Arminium gave up none of her secrets, even once the team had really stepped foot into the city. They’d secured the flight tower before setting out. Three of her troopers, a lone unaugmented human pilot in tow, had crossed the vast, flat asphalt of landing pad, weaving through overturned fuel trucks and overladen luggage drones, even a planetary lifter, dark and silent. The refueling hoses were still hooked up, and the gunship’s sensors had read residual heat in the engines, as if it was in the midst of pre-flight checks.
After radioing back that the control tower was up and running, her people had linked up with the rest of the team, the pilot deposited back inside the cocoon of the gunship’s cockpit. From there, they’d advanced on the transit port’s ground exit, the yawning gates through which the city’s traffic had flowed. The team had stood there a moment, on the other side of the transit lines, staring out into the gloom. The agent crossed the precipice first.
She’d expected the city to be silent, back on the gunship. No people, no traffic, no life at all near as the team could tell. But it was as loud as any city she’d ever stepped foot in. Air circ, the great atmospheric systems that threaded through the towers and rooted underneath the streets. They hummed the drone of filtration, draining out the alien atmosphere of Arminium’s world for something more breathable. Chimes, from a local CivAdmin, announcing appointment openings for commercial licenses. Down here at the bottom of the city’s sprawl, great condensed pressure systems whispered past, muffled winds buffeting across their insulating armor plates.
The loudest sounds were the maglevs. You could hear the roar of the displaced air, winding through the great trunks of the hab-towers. The titanic trains still ran their routes from station to station. The hum of the Realm-reactors buzzed from all around, a constant sub-conscious scratching. Harkin had lived many of her years in ubiquitous metropolises like these, but it was the first time she’d ever really heard the insect-swarm voice of a major city’s reactor.
The whole team was hearing sounds they’d never really noticed before. Rennock and Vuong had called in voices, before they’d run them down to a public address system giving times for a local theater.
Their progress into the city had been filled with that, phantom noises and fluttering sensor contacts that would inevitably result in nothing. Twice, someone reported laughter, but a sweep of the city block they’d been bounding down had scrounged up nothing. It was just too large, the city, the towers pressing down on you from above. Her troopers were filling it with noise because there should be noise here.
They were making their way through the main thoroughfares, keeping to the open to speed their progress along. The choke of vehicles slowed them at times, but what couldn’t be clambered over or skirted around could be moved pretty easy by ten pairs of power armored hands- and the direction of their lone civilian. Harkin made herself stop sweeping the endless rows of apartment windows above her, watching the agent up ahead, where they forged their path ahead, ensconced between her two point troopers. The team itself was pretty spread out, at least a solid ten meters of combat separation in any direction, but she’d rather take the chance of the escort group drawing fire clustered up. Let Legion plate soak anything incoming; it was better than letting the agent try.
She still hadn’t learned the agent’s name. That wasn’t necessarily unusual in her line of work, and with the number of Bureau agents who went from deep recon to foreign embed postings, it made a certain amount of sense to keep a roster of ghosts. But this one wasn’t one of those embeds. They’d spoken very little, but she recognized a long-time operator in any field. They’d been sent on enough missions like these that it had become as routine for them as reloading was for her. She could do it with one hand.
It was the attitude. They walked like they belonged here, like they were part of Arminium. Where Harkin and her team jerked their heads left and right, up and down, rifles up and fingers tightened round the trigger, the agent was calm. They simply forded ahead, standing in the lee of her troopers like a hedge beneath the great boughs.
It left an uneasy feeling with her. Anything that seemed like it fit in here, down in the urban deep, was something she wanted no part of.
The rest of the group was as ideal as she could have asked. The Legions bred good people. She’d only just been assigned to the team a few weeks ago. Hades 1-1, a quick reaction force for the 8th Fleet, was drawn together the way all of the 8th’s spec ops was: by taking the best from the Legions, and throwing them together. They were drawn from half a dozen specializations, and only two of them- Corporal Antonin Vargas and Princeps Eion Techapsi- had served in the same unit before. But the business of a Legionary was a shared language, and the team had taken together quick. They ran together well in drills, contributed in tactical planning, and coordinated as the five-person fireteams they preferred like it was an art. If they didn’t belong here in the dead city, too vital and physically present, they certainly acted like they were ready for whatever this city had to reveal.
They were making good, steady time. The path hadn’t been a direct one, having to wind through the city’s dense urban sprawl. Twice, they’d actually nearly avoided the city’s titanic maglevs. The trains, dozens of meters across and even more tall, had come barreling out of nowhere, shrieking at full speed along the transonic transit lines. She’d caught herself looking for passengers on the first one, gawking behind the faceplate of her helmet as it flew by. She knew a few of the others had, too. You just half expected it here, like a switch getting thrown. They’d seen nothing in the flashing lights of the passing commuter cars and the empty, yawning doors of transport cars devoid of the materials humans would have had loaded on there.
The second time it happened, her corporal sent her a comms request on his personal channel.
“Spooky shit, ain’t it?” Antonin Vargas had a warm voice, husky and confident. It fit the easygoing drop trooper well, and it made him an incredible second in command. He was nice to talk to. He had sidled up to her as they’d kept walking, the team easing up a little from the earlier jumpiness. The maglevs had gotten the spooks out of them, and they were getting more comfortable just being on the move.
“It’s not great, Toni. None of it’s great. We had what, three separate Bureau teams with us at the briefing? Hell, we all got earmarked for this from the NavInt chief,” Vargas grumbled when she mentioned the rank, “and no actual info. We didn’t even know they were sending someone with us until the drop, and I don’t know anything about him. That’s a lot of Navy Intelligence presence for no real intel beyond ‘go here, do this’. Ma’am.” They hopped the couple of meters of overturned groundcar in front of them. The further into the city they got, the more choked the streets were becoming. For the first time, they were seeing some actual disruption, some evidence of disturbance. A few crashed buses, tables and chairs scattered in front of one of the city’s wine houses. It wasn’t enough to slow the team, even the civilian, but it was making it a little bit more of an exercise.
“Well, at least they sent a decent one. Older, that one, a little more cultured. Combat cultured, if you catch my drift...” her corporal trailed off, the hint of conspiracy in his voice. Not a conspiracy at speculating where the Bureau of Intelligence agent came from- they were plenty free to do that- but to hope this one could keep up. The Bureau certainly had its enhanced people, civilians who’d taken the genemod and cybernetic plunge. You didn’t have to be a bulked out slab of hard fighting trooper like her people to take a little walk on the wild side, and every Legionary hoped to get one. Her people would walk through fire for somebody; it was just nice if that somebody could also take a little heat.
Vargas’ glimmer of hope for the agent meant a lot. He had a second nature for picking the good ones.
“So what do you think it is, ma’am,” he continued, ducking a collapsed walkway where one of the municipal drones had crashed into it. A couple of minder bots were busy attending to it, and the team could hear the rumble of one of the city repair crews. Harkin could picture the massive industrial vehicle crushing the carpet of transports, trams and conveyors left sitting on the streets. “It’s not a raid. Arminium’s got the whole system on monitor, and it talks with the other planets in the system pretty regularly. This would have been called in, and the 8th has a fleet depot just a couple days from here. The only reason it would go two weeks no contact, and trip our protocols, is if they couldn’t see it coming.” They both laughed at that- short, harsh barks. The idea itself was a joke. A modern world like this could see a whole hell of a lot of bad things coming its way, and do quite a lot about pretty much all of them. An immense amount of work had gone into a system like this.
Grav-nets and Realm-pulse sensor buoys at the edge of the system’s limit reported on every objects entering or leaving it, and the astronavigation supercomputers in Arminium and the other population centers in the city turned raw data, flashed down to them at speeds faster than light, to build a living picture of the entire system. From the few times Harkin had done urban defense ops, she’d had an up-close glimpse of what that looked like. Arminium saw her environment, celestial and planetary, better than any of them could ever hope to perceive their own. She had perfect clarity.
From there, civil defense options were pretty broad. A properly warned city could be made impervious to a whole host of physical impacts and weapons, and it made Frontier raiding of anything beyond an isolated town pointless. Likewise, even a populous frontier city was a minor prize to the great galactic states. It explained the lack of obvious violence. Anything that could really crack Arminium wouldn’t have wasted the time to do so, and anything that couldn’t would have either been intercepted by Harkin’s fleet or just left, not wanting to waste the resources.
Which, frustratingly, put the answer firmly outside of Harkin’s field. A realization which, upon reaching, she really didn’t want to share with her corporal.
“If it was as easy as guessing, we wouldn’t have the Inquisitor here with us, Toni. But we wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think they might need a hammer. So what gets past the all-seeing eye, takes out a city, and somehow might still need a team of the meanest shitkickers the 8th has on hand?” A little extra steel on that last line, using her voice to sell bravado she couldn’t really believe. Vargas, credit to him, laughed like he meant it.
She gave another silent thanks to the Legion he’d been plucked from. A good second was a resource you had to cultivate, and she knew his home unit was weaker for his detachment. Not for nothing, she noted dryly to herself, but they also didn’t have to do drops into places like this. They could survive without him.
They were coming up on a bend in the road they were on. The agent and their minders were about fifty meters ahead, the rest of the team strewn about the roadway and footpaths that lined the streets. Most of the team had stowed their weapons, rifles mag-clamped to their backs or hanging from the webbing strapped and stretched across their armor like a spider’s weave.
The agent paused. Demba, one of her point troopers, went scurrying off ahead, around the bend. The young commando disappeared, and the agent’s icon flashed on her HUD. They wanted to talk to her. Vargas saw it too, turning to shrug at her as they both broke into a brief jog to reach the front of the formation. She sent the hold signal to the rest of the team. They unlimbered the weapons they’d just stowed, some dropping to one knee, the others scrambling for good cover.
The agent grimaced as they approached.
“Sergeant, Corporal Vargas. We’ve found something.” They turned, trusting the two of them to follow. Or maybe not caring if they did. They followed the Inquisitor round the bend. Another twenty or so meters ahead, Hastatus Demba crouched next to a hab-tower’s entrance, still as death. The agent paced ahead; they weren’t blessed with the kind of senses that had clued Demba in, the ones that brought Harkin and her corporal to a halt as soon as the commando came into view.
Splashed across the entrance, the unmistakable odor of it wafting in the air, was the vivid crimson of fresh blood.
Help a multiply disabled lesbian from the global south currently between jobs
I quit my soul crushing suicidality inducing job in early June. I've been looking since (and actually from even before, I'd been wanting out for years), but it's tough now where I live even for entry level positions with Kast's and Quiroz's buffoonery (in summary, we were recently VERY fucked with a new reform and I'm trying hard not to think about it much 🤪).
I'd appreciate help just to stay on top of my bills, please.
sorry but this post is really silly. people didn't just randomly out of nowhere start saying right-wingers are mad because they get no women, a massive right-wing movement emerged that said, overtly, "we are right wing and angry because we get no women". (and no, i do not think that women will magically appear to suck your dick if you're a good person, but there are a lot of cases where someone is romantically unsuccessful in ways that are pretty clearly tied to them not being good person. and right wing men *specifically* complain that women reject them for their politics!)
is the idea that, what, no one is allowed to comment on the existence of incel ideology? because it night hurt the feelings of lonely men who definitely aren't into incel ideology but get personally offended when you criticize incel ideology For Some Reason? frankly I think this kind of oversensitive language policing does a lot more to push people away from the left than critiquing incel ideology does.
2087
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